Oracle Releases Java 8

March 18, 2014

By Developer.com Staff

At long last, Oracle has officially released Java Development Kit (JDK) 8. The biggest change in the update is the new support for lambda expressions, which provides some functional programming abilities.

"There is no doubt that the change in syntax related to lambda expressions is the biggest new thing in the language and likely to have the most impact in the future," added IDC analyst Al Hilwa. He continued, "However, lambda should be seen as part of a set of features designed to improve the ability of the language to accommodate modern architectures in terms of increasing parallelization in software."

Originally, Oracle planned to release JDK 8 last fall, but it pushed the timeline back because of security concerns.